The 8-years-old girl whose story you’ll read in coming lines did not make it to the 2nd night of her wedding nor did she make it to her 9th or 10th birthday.

Her name unknown, my source telephoned me last week at 9:30 pm to tell me her story. At the first I thought it’s just going to be a short conversation but later it was unveiled that the story is different.

The story came from a village in Khashrood district of Nimruz province in Afghanistan.

A medical doctor assigned in the main hospital in Zaranj city, the capital of the province, who wished to remain unnamed confirmed that he was “made aware” of the incident and that it was “too late to do anything for her” as well the “remote area didn’t allow them to do anything”.

The girl was one of the several daughters of a man in his late 30s. For an unknown reason he gave his daughter to the Mullah of their village for a big amount of money. It is also common in Afghanistan’s rural areas or 3rd level provinces/cities to marry young girls to old men, and trading their daughters for their debts or other items.

The mullah is in his late 50s and is the mosque guy of the village where this incident happened.

The mullah is already married and has many children too.
The two families hold a tribal meeting, agree on the price that the groom’s family pay to the bride’s family, and they set a date for wedding.

In rural areas like this here there are no engagements or any ceremonies beforehand like there are some in the metropolitan and urban areas.

The two families planned a wedding party, the wedding and Nekah (The religious process in which a woman is officially married to a man) took place and the 8-years-old bride became the 50-years-old Mullah’s 2nd wife.

The celebration party was over and the sun downed – the time to have sex (not make love) with the 8-years-old bride.

The girl was just 8 years old and everybody understands the fact that she knows nothing about sex or wedding or making love or virginity or sexual related topics; not even at a basic level for two reasons, one being that she’s just a child – not even a teenager and that in that part of the country, nobody knows anything about these things nor they are given trainings or education about a healthy sexual life.

The mullah takes off the bride’s clothes as well as his owns and with apparent so much happiness approaches her for sexual intercourse with the 8-years-old bride.
Because of the Mullah’s huge physique which gave him a big penis, he threw himself on her and started to penetrate the girl’s vagina.

After several tries that led him to failure to penetrate her vagina, the Mullah was frustrated.

He failed because the 8-years-old girl who was about to die was physically thin and had a very tight vagina opening.

Sourced from the Mullah’s animal behavior, he took out the sharp knife that he always carried with himself in his pocket and tore apart the girl’s vagina from the clitoris side upwards as well as tore it downwards towards her anus in order to make the vagina larger enough so he can enter his penis into her vagina.

Naturally, she started to bleed in a very bad amount, but the mullah was too annoyed for not being able to have sex with her, to care for what he did or her bleeding or her wounds that he gave her.

The girl had her scarf stuffed in her mouth, crying and trying to not raise her voice because others were there in the room adjacent to or outside.

It is a rule in some of the areas in Afghanistan that the groom brings out a piece of cloth that he cleaned his wife’s hymen blood with it as a proof that the girl was virgin.

Mullah entered his penis into the girl’s severely bleeding vagina and had sexual intercourse with her on a blood-covered bed, and then got up and cleaned himself with a cloth.

The girl, who now has lost everything, was bleeding and there was nobody to help her neither could the Mullah ask for help as it was a shame for him and the girl’s family (who were sitting over a cup of tea in the other room, would kill him).

Our 8-years-old bride bled and went into a traumatic shock because of both forced sex as well as severe bleeding. She had lost so much blood, this I can tell for certain.

She bled and bled as herself was in trauma shock until morning and early in the morning around 5 when the sun was about to rise, she passed away.

According to the Mullah, she was pale and her eyes were open when she died. The bed, as he described, was all red with her blood and she was lying in her blood only. No cloth beneath her was recognizable and everything was in dried blood because a whole night had passed on the blood.

She was pale because she had lost all her body’s blood. Her eyes were open as she was shivering when she died and her hands were tied in a praying position, saying her death time prayer.

The Mullah called in the same person and asked him to clean up the mess around and prepare a reason to tell the others for her death. Because the man was a close friend or family of the mullah, he did whatever he could, including every piece of cloth that was bloody.

They wrapped her in a piece of white clothes and called the others that she has passed away.

That morning her family mourned her death in the saddest manner without looking for proper explanation about her death, and then took her to wash her body as a religious ritual.

Because the Mullah had a great influence on the village, none of the women who washed the girl’s body dared to ask or seek the reason for the wounds around her vagina.

By 10 am or so they rallied the now-dead 8-years-old bride to the graveyard and buried her.

Her life ended.

The close friend of mullah, who knew everything, was very upset and shared the story with my source that then called me and told me the story.

Another doctor that I asked in Zaranj said that he wasn’t aware of the case, but he remembers that he used to treat the now-dead bride when she was 4 or 5 years old.

This doctor also asked me to not name him anywhere but only said that he was “deeply saddened that incidents like that still happen in Afghanistan”.

He called it one of the reasons of Afghanistan no going forward: People’s idiocy and uncivilized behaviors and traditions.

This story reached to me was told the exact way as it happened by the Mullah to a very close friend of him after the girl’s dead body was buried. According to the Mullah, he had a “bad conscience” about it.